Thankful Thoughts

  • I is for Incredible!

    Today’s post is a ‘guest post’. My sister Maya and her family built a garden house in their back yard in Portland a couple of years ago, and she posted about it recently on Facebook. I asked her if I could share her post here, because I am so amazingly impressed by the entire endeavor. That they did the work themselves, that they used mostly recycled materials, that it came out so beautifully. Truly incredible. I wish I had these powers, but alas, I do not. Without any further ado, here’s my sister’s post. ***** The summer of 2021 a wish/dream of mine came true. The kids had long outgrown…

  • G is for Giverny

    Giverny is the village where Impressionist painter Claude Monet built his beautiful gardens, which he painted over and over again. I’ve been fortunate enough to see these lovely gardens twice, first in early June of 2018, and then again in late September of 2022. It was lovely to see the difference in flowers, between late spring and late summer. The first 3 pictures above are from my 2022 visit, and the bottom 3 are from 2018. Here I am last September in Paris, at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, which in addition to these huge paintings of his water lilies also houses a lovely collection of impressionist art. Not…

  • D is for Decor

    Elisabeth recently redecorated her daughter’s bedroom, and posted wonderful pictures of the final project. This brought to mind one room we have redone in our home, the downstairs bathroom. Back in 2018 we had a leak under our home that caused a lot of disruption, due to re-piping the downstairs from under the slab to through the walls. You can read about it, and see pictures of the open walls and pipes, here if you’re so inclined. When they re-piped the bathroom, they took down the horrible huge mirror, and tore open the wall behind it, to get to the pipes. After they closed everything up again, the room needed…

  • C is for Côte d’Azur

    Last September, my cousin Carey and I took a 2 1/2 week trip to France. She and her wife have a time share situation, which they pay a lot of money for, and she offered me the opportunity to go with her to France, since Diane (her wife) didn’t want to go to Europe. Carey lived in France for awhile in the mid-80s, and hadn’t been back since. We spent our first week in the South of France, the Côte d’Azur, in the hillside town of Mougins. Mougins is certainly a touristic area, though not as busy as Nice, Cannes, or Antibes. Like so many of the hillside towns, Mougins…

  • B is for Brittany

    Back in 2018, we took a trip to France to celebrate our daughter Maya’s graduation from UC Berkeley, as well as our 25th wedding anniversary. Ted and Maya had gone to England the year before, with his mom and brother, to visit family there. On that trip, they took a couple of days on their own in Paris, which they loved. The last time I had been in France was in 1993, on our honeymoon. Ted has a friend, Jean-Marc, from his days in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. Jean-Marc is French and was at Penn studying US History, and now is a professor in Brest, on the…

  • Playing Tourist at Home

    This last weekend, my cousin spent a couple of days with us, and we played tourist together. She lives in Oceanside, which is near San Diego, and came up to visit us, to see our Great Aunt, and to spend a few days in the Sacramento area, where she has quite a few friends, before jetting off to Orlando with one of these friends for a vacation. This is the cousin that I went to France with last year, and we always have fun together. She flew in on Thursday, and we went to lunch and walked around a bit downtown. In all of her visits to see us, she…

  • Dinners Last Week

    Another week of figuring out what to make for dinner is in the books. I had it pretty easy this week, we went out a couple of times, but I made up for it by cooking Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday. Monday – We had this delicious Garlicky Spinach and Chickpea Soup. I love this soup, it is very tasty. Modifications made for my family’s needs: Ted’s doctor told him that beans are very good for him, but they also are carb heavy, so he needs to balance them out. WTF. I mean, what is he supposed to eat? Frustrating. He had some soup, and some leftover lamb curry for extra…

  • Paso Robles and Pismo Beach

    Last week, Ted’s brother Steve invited Ted and me to go wine tasting in Paso Robles, which is about 3 1/2 to 4 hours southwest of us. He had won a wine tasting package at a charity auction, which included 3 tastings and a hotel stay. Nice! We started out early on Tuesday morning, spent the night there, and came home on Wednesday afternoon. We started out at Bon Niche, a tiny winery in the nearby town of San Miguel. The winery is owned and run by a woman with help from her parents, who come down a couple of times a year to help out from their home in…

  • J’s Index – Alaska

    *Note: If you are subscribed to my posts, you may have seen this one already. I accidentally posted it instead of scheduling, but I didn’t intend to have this post go live until I finished my other Alaska posts. So I took it down and am re-posting it now.* This post is an homage to the Harper’s Index, a summary of our trip to Alaska. The photo above is from our whale watching trip. It was so beautiful, it looked like a painting to me. Number of Flights Taken – 7 Number of Boat Trips – 2 Number of Rental Cars – 3 Number of Airbnbs – 3 Number of…

  • There be Whales Here!

    Ted and I started our last full day in Juneau by taking a walk through downtown, over to Douglas Island, and back. We saw some totem poles, a huge statue of a humpback whale (photo credit to Ted), and the State Capital Building, which is probably the smallest in the US. After that, we came home and had a light lunch, and then Maya, Kathy, and I went whale watching! I’ve never been whale watching before, though we did go dolphin watching in Maui a few years ago, which was great. We have whale watching off the coast of California, but that’s in the open ocean, while in Juneau you…

  • Mendenhall Glacier

    Tuesday, we all drove back out to the Mendenhall Glacier, which is where we had gone to see the stars a couple of nights prior. In daylight, it was sort of crowded with tourists, though not too bad. There is a waterfall at one side of the glacier, which we had seen and heard the other night. There is a beaver dam, though it is covered by branches and you couldn’t really see it well. Maya and I had gone to the glacier on our prior trip to Juneau, in 1999 (when she was 3, so she doesn’t remember), and I could see that the glacier has receded some since…

  • Juneau

    Juneau is so beautiful, I can easily see how my mom, Richard, and Kathy just fell in love with it. The flight from Anchorage to Juneau is pretty quick, and the price difference between coach and first class wasn’t that much, so we splurged. FUN! The picture above is one of many from that flight. The mountains just go on forever. As you can see, we finally got some sunny weather. Don’t get me wrong, I like misty, drizzly weather, but thus far it had really gotten in the way of some of the things I wanted to see, like the stars at night without light pollution, the Aurora Borealis,…

  • Homer

    Homer is a beautiful town of about 5,500 people approximately 220 miles southwest of Anchorage. Back when we lived in Fairbanks, my brother Richard and I spent a year at a hippy private school, when he was in 3rd grade and I was in 1st. I am not convinced that we learned much in the way of the 3 Rs, but we did a lot of fun projects, like building igloos and making applesauce. Most of the school went to Homer, 3rd graders through 12th graders. It was a very small school, I don’t know how many kids went. Not a lot. The older kids looked after the younger kids,…

  • Anchored down in Anchorage

    We spent two full days in Anchorage, and mostly took it easy. We started our first day by going to the airport to pick up our rental car. That normally wouldn’t be worth mentioning, but the service we received was so gracious, I feel it warrants mentioning. The clerk at the National car rental counter was having trouble with our rental, it was coming out about $400 more than we were quoted, so he called his supervisor in to help him fix it. She was able to override the system, and tried to figure out how to get it to charge us the quoted price, but somehow it came out…